Author Michael Pollan on the food system

Photo Courtesy of Penguin USAMichael Pollan recently took his discussion and scare tactics on modern food practices to a stage in Maryland.

Michael Pollan might have one of the hardest jobs in the country: Trying to
encourage Americans to eat better -- or at least to better understand the
current food system and how it has led to a diet that’s slowly making us sick.

The author and activist’s work sometimes leads him away from his computer and
to venues like Maryland’s Strathmore, where he recently managed to pull off a
careful balancing act. Pollan had to explain modern food manufacturing and
complex agricultural policies while simultaneously keeping a music hall full of
people entertained. He used props from the supermarket (sometimes known as
processed foods). He used humor. He even used scare tactics.

On stage, he’s sort of like the Gallagher of the food movement, smashing old
concepts instead of old vegetables.

I had a chance to sit down with Pollan for about 40 minutes before his talk,
which wasn’t nearly enough time. Below is an edited excerpt of our conversation.

Q.At an earlier stop on your tour, you told a Cleveland audience,
"Really intelligent young people are getting into farming. Some will crash and
burn, but someone will be the Steve Jobs of agriculture."

A. (Laughs.) I think the challenge is going to be to come up with farming
systems that are sustainable, by which I mean don’t require a lot of fossil fuel
and that are nevertheless quite intensive. The ability to produce large amounts
of food in small spaces.

We have some examples. I think Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms in Virginia’s
Shenandoah Valley is a possible contender. Will Allen, the urban farmer who has
a very complex system involving fish and greens and other vegetables, where fish
waste feeds the greens and the greens clean the water for the fish. So I’m
talking about people who can come up with new rotations and new relationships
between species to maximize production. I think there is a lot of experimenting
going on.

The amazing thing is that it’s done without any help from the government.
Very little research money goes into this. It’s just visionary farmers just
figuring out how to do it. So I’m not talking about inventing a new vegetable
we’re all going to want, but I’m talking about systems, devising innovative
systems to use biology to grow food without a lot of fossil fuel inputs.

Q. I saw recently that Americans spend about 7 percent of their income on
food. By contrast, China spends 33 percent of its income on food, France, 13.5
percent, and Japan, 14.2 percent. Americans seem to have this incapacity to
spend more on food. How do you begin to change that?

A. I think it’s an enormous challenge, because right now cheap food is baked
into our economy and our society. It wasn’t always this cheap. When I was a kid,
it was 18 percent of our income went to food, twice what it is now, at least.
But we, beginning really with the Nixon administration, figured out ways to
drive down the cost. This was a matter of agriculture policy and technological
breakthroughs.

Q. Earl Butz.

A. Earl Butz, exactly. And coming up with a system that promoted
overproduction on the farms, and then that led to all this innovation in
processing. How do you take all that cheap corn and soy and turn it into food?
Or feedlots: figuring out how to put animals in these highly concentrated
operations and the use of pharmaceuticals that allow that to happen. So that has
been the focus of our food system since the ‘70s: driving down the cost of food.

We’ve gotten really good at it, but it turns out . . . that cheap food has
enormous costs. In the same period of time that we went from spending 18 percent
of our income on food to under 9 percent of our income on food, we’ve gone from
spending 5 percent of our national income on health care to 17 percent of our
income on health care. So we’re paying for that cheap food with our higher
health-care costs.